Many people are accustomed to consuming sophisticated, well edited media, as seen on television, in movies, and in other professionally produced media. Because of these heightened expectations, non-expert video editors are likely to fail at producing video productions that fulfill their personal expectations, or the expectations of their highly-conditioned audience. Non-expert users of non-linear video editing (e.g., digital video editing) systems typically cannot create attractive looking and sounding videos. Unlike professional video editors who have knowledge and experience in making effective editing decisions, non-expert users have little to no experience, and would therefore benefit greatly from a coach. Such non-expert video editors may need editing assistance to create higher-quality products. For example, if a non-expert user had one-on-one professional advice on how to make a high impact, upbeat video, he would likely receive particular editing suggestions (e.g., use jump-cuts in places where music beats and loud audio peaks, like explosions, are located). With this advice, such a non-expert user could cut to dramatic video image changes at particular points corresponding to the audio. Unfortunately, many users are unable to hire an expert video editing coach, and are therefore unable to apply this advice or any other techniques applied by expert editors.
Conventional media editing tools (e.g., video editing software) provide users with the ability to capture, edit, import, and modify both visual and audio media for the development of audio/visual works. For example, a user can create an audio/visual work with a media editing tool (e.g., Microsoft® Windows Movie Maker Version 2.1) and the media editing tool can provide the user with several functions, including trimming, splicing, and cropping video, merging image, audio, and video media, adding transitions and effects between constituent parts, and overlaying additional audio, to name a few. In the hands of a skilled user, such a conventional system can provide a means for merging several different types of media together into a unified work, different than all of its constituent portions. Unfortunately, such conventional media editing tools do not provide the type of advanced guidance required to substantially improve editing for the novice user. Without assistance from a human expert, most users are relegated to creating basic video productions without the tools and expertise available to a professional editor. A way to provide some of these tools and expertise to novice users based upon their specific media content would be useful. Moreover, a way to automatically edit and produce an audio/visual work or semi-automatically produce one by allowing modification of the results yielded by the automatic process and then producing (rendering) the audio/visual work would also be useful, such as to a novice user.
Moreover, even for the expert editor who understands how to effectively manually edit media, additional tools identifying critical events in the media being edited can facilitate more efficient editing. In other words, automatically identifying potential edit events to the skilled editor can facilitate more efficient and effective editing because effort can be applied to the creative aspects of the editing process, rather than to the identification of potential editing events. Thus, a way to provide tools to an experienced editor in identifying potential editing events would be useful.